Right up there with the conversation about whether you’ve put the heating on yet is the one about spiders and whether the autumn influx has hit your home.

They’ve been trickling in over at our place, but it hasn’t been too traumatic - yet.

Sadly, experience tells me that we’ll soon be comically walking into hidden webs when we leave the house of a morning, thrashing around for fear of having arachnids in our hairdos.

We lived in Sydney for a few years, and during that time my whole concept of what is normal in the grand scheme of eight-legged housemates changed beyond recognition.

I was introduced to the dark, long-and-hairy-legged world of the Huntsman, a species so alarming-looking it makes your average British house spider look cute. “They don’t bite!” I was reliably informed. “They won’t hurt you!” That’s all well and good, but there’s no getting away from the fact that they look like Halloween joke spiders, but real.

Right up there with the time a cockroach crawled up the side of my bed while I was in it (also in Australia) is the time I tried to leave the house but couldn’t because there was a Huntsman on the gate. Just sitting there. What to do? Fling it open and risk the spider flying at me? I couldn’t risk it. Instead, I climbed over the (blessedly only waist-high) fence into next-door’s front garden and exited their spider-free gate instead. We were on good terms. They’d have done the same.

After surviving such ordeals, I resolved to be a lot less pathetic on returning to England, and these days I can do the glass and card trick with smaller spiders without too much drama. But anything bigger than a 10p piece and I’m back there at that gate, unable to move.

When it comes to commercial property, what does central St Albans really need? Retail fans have been lobbying for a John Lewis or a Primark for many a long while, but what we keep getting is coffee shops, more coffee shops and, occasionally, a restaurant. Oh, apart from now we’re also getting a gym.